RABAT, Afghanistan (AP)  "Shoot them! Shoot them! Move quickly," an anti-Taliban commander shouted into a radio Monday as positions of the ruling Islamic militia fell one by one.

After each success, opposition fighters fired victory shots into the air and screamed "God is great!"

As northern alliance forces closed in on Kabul, trucks brought hundreds of reinforcements to the front lines, while other vehicles headed in the opposite direction, evacuating the dead, the wounded and captured Taliban fighters. His voice crackling over the radio, an opposition commander ordered his fighters to capture four Taliban tanks.

The Shomali plain, about 25 miles north of the capital, was covered in smoke and fire as the push for Kabul began. U.S. war jets pounded the Taliban front lines as they have for weeks.

Opposition fighters launched their offensive just before noon, after one particularly fierce round of pounding by U.S. B-52 bombers. Tanks and artillery provided cover as soldiers firing Kalashnikov rifles and rocket launchers charged forward.

The advance toward Kabul capped four days of stunning victories by Afghanistan's opposition amid fierce U.S. attacks on the Taliban to punish it for harboring Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida terrorist network, accused of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

The alliance staged advances along the two roads leading to Kabul from the north. There was no Taliban resistance along the Old Road, where opposition forces advanced to within four miles of the capital  to the town of Shakar Dara, said Abdullah, the opposition's foreign minister.

On the New Road, however, Taliban soldiers and their allies  Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens and others  fought back. Fierce gunbattles there killed and wounded an unknown number of fighters on each side. During the fighting, a sniper fired at an Associated Press photographer and hit his bulletproof vest.

On the New Road, which abuts the important Bagram air base, the Taliban were driven to within 12 miles of the capital, Abdullah said. The opposition controlled the air base even before Monday's offensive but have been unable to use it for flights because of the proximity of Taliban forces in the nearby hills.

Those Taliban forces have not yet been driven back completely, Abdullah said.

Since seizing the key northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif on Friday, the opposition has captured every province in northern Afghanistan except Kunduz. On Monday, alliance officials also claimed to have taken Herat, the main city in western Afghanistan.

Jubilant anti-Taliban soldiers waved to each other and flashed thumbs-up signs as they drove in trucks and armored personnel carriers to the new front lines. Asked where he was taking his men, a tank commander named Adel said simply, "to Kabul, to Kabul."

But opposition officials have said repeatedly that they would stop at the "gates" of Kabul rather than enter the city  a nod to U.S. concerns about the makeup of a post-Taliban regime.

The northern alliance is largely Tajik and Uzbek, and any future government that excludes the Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group, is considered a recipe for instability.

The alliance's leaders made many enemies among Kabul's residents when they held power five years ago, and virtually destroyed the city in ethnic infighting.

Before entering Kabul this time, the alliance has said it would wait for an agreement on establishing a broad-based government  even though negotiations for that agreement have so far shown little progress.

The speed of the Taliban collapse suggests many local commanders and Taliban fighters are switching sides. At Rabat, until Monday afternoon a front-line zone, officials said Taliban troops on a nearby hill had fled and there was no danger of a counterattack.

Moments later, holdouts fired a round of artillery, and Abdullah acknowledged there may be "small pockets" of resistance.

Glowing tracer bullets flew across the Shomali plain. An orange ball of fire burned in the hills at the plain's western end, a signal from the opposition to the U.S. jets not to bomb there.

As the sun began to set, fighters and villagers faced toward Mecca and prayed as explosions rang out  from U.S. jets, from soldiers firing into the air, from Taliban troops attempting a last stand.

Abdul Hamid, a 65-year-old farmer, looked out over the plain and pointed south toward the new front lines, where he said he has two sons fighting with the opposition.